August 27, 2017

The Flooding in Houston Is Absolutely Devastating

Fifty inches of rain could fall in parts of Texas.

Mark Mulligan/Houston Chronicle via AP

Hurricane Harvey has now been downgraded to a tropical storm, but the devastation is only just beginning for southeast Texas. After the storm made landfall near Rockport, Texas, as a powerful Category 4 hurricane, emergency officials reported heavy damages to buildings in homes in the small town of 10,000 as well as in nearby Port Aransas. Now, catastrophic flooding has begun. Two feet of rain fell in just 24 hours in Houston. Forecasters are calling for as much as 50 inches of rain, the highest ever recorded in Texas, by the time the storm is over.

The National Weather Service in Houston issued a flash flood emergency as reports of devastating flooding began to come in.

By Sunday morning, highways and neighborhoods were already submerged.

911 services were overwhelmed as stranded people called for help.

More than 1,000 people have been rescued so far in the Houston area. The rain is expected to continue to fall for the next few days with the possibility of the storm going back out to the Gulf of Mexico and making another landfall in Houston on Wednesday.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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